The hoon : controlling the streets?

According the the Macquarie Dictionary of New Words, hoon is an Australianism, with the earliest citation found in Xavier Herbert's Capricornia of 1938: a hoon being "that sort of flash person who fangs their car around for amusement". Hoon can also refer to those persons partaking in a careless, self-indulgent practice, and it is in this sense that Herbert used the term. It was not until the mid-1990s that the current hoon discourse gathered consistency across mass-media and political registers. The recurring discursive and televisual imagery used in these moral panics was of "hoons" taking over or "controlling" the streets.